STM's site has its navigational quirks, but all documentation and
standard peripheral librares were readily available, with no
registration, no hoops, no fuss. Everything I need to build a sample
project with four different toolchains is now saved on my workstation.

Freescale's site was better organized, and easier to find information,
but they take a very different philosophy when it comes to actually
obtaining what you were looking for. First, you have to register,
supply a ton of information, and agree to a clickthrough license that
basically states you may not actually be allowed to do anything with the
code you're downloading.

To top that all off, as I type this their site's CDN is basically shot.
All downloads are glacially slow, with occasional bursts of 4-8KB of
data followed by the connections dropping. Even the documentation
download wasn't working.

Assuming I ever get this stuff downloaded, in order to get what I want
(namely the CMSIS and peripheral library definitions their MCUs require)
I'm going to have to do some serious spelunking since my goal is to use
GNU toolchains to create a codebase that isn't completely tied to a
single MCU vendor. Or hack, a single MCU from a single vendor, which is
what the Processor Export suite seems to accomplish.

No wonder ARM is trying to push the mbed platform; Despite ARM's earlier
efforts to standardize ARM MCU programming with CMSIS, Freescale aptly
demonstrates the penchance of MCU vendors to shoot themselves in both
left feet. mbed standardizes things at a much higher level, effectively
abstracting out (and therefore commoditizing) the entire MCU, even the
I/Os, generic peripherals, and more esoteric things like clock setup.

Freescale, you have failed. For all your talk of your "freedom"
platform, you're doing a piss-poor job of enabling someone to do, well,
anything useful with your hardware. (This is especially true for
experienced MCU developers!)

In contrast, STM does a pretty good job here; they provide a full
standalone peripheral library, including sample applications to drive
each peripheral that tie into several different toolchains. They also
provide several full-up applications and link to 3rd-party samples,
including ensuring that FreeRTOS has first-class support for their
parts.

Anyway. Time for bed. Maybe I'll actually get a hello world project
generated for the STM32F4 tomorrow. It's obvious that the KL25Z is
going to take a lot more work, and I'm beginning to not care enough to
put forth the effort.